I never thought I would ever portray Israel our ultimate tormentor and existential enemy in good light even in comparison to the worst human rights offenders under the sun.
However in light of the pornographically gruesome images that keep coming from Egypt I feel I have to admit that the murderous Egyptian junta of Abdul Fattah Sisi has exceeded by far the benchmarks of murderousness and nefariousness reached by Israel in the course of the long bitter conflict with the Palestinians.
I know that what I am saying will be viewed by some people as politically incorrect and detrimental to the Palestinian national cause a cause I spent the prime of my life defending.
I know myself quite well and I don’t think that anyone Arab or otherwise is in a moral position to accuse me of pandering to the Zionists or seeking a certificate of good conduct from them.
But one has to exercise intellectual and moral honesty in order to be faithful to one’s conscience. In the final analysis one must be answerable to his or her conscience.
Yes Israel committed untold crimes and killed many innocent Palestinians and non-Palestinians. Israel after all is our enemy and enemies should not be expected to behave charitably toward their enemies.
Yes we are all aware of Dir Yasin Sabra and Shatilla and the Ibrahimi Mosque carnage of 1994 just to mention a few of Israel’s numerous atrocities.
However it never happened that the Israeli army “liquidated” political detainees by way of suffocating them to death or executing them on their way to jails and detention centers.
Even Palestinian guerillas who survived difficult martyrdom operations were arrested even hospitalized and then prosecuted irrespective of the nature of the Israeli justice system. But at the very least they were kept alive which really would make the Egyptian victims of the Egyptian army’s brutality wish they were being dealt with by the Israeli army not their own army.
Yes there were some cases when the Israeli army and Shin Bet agents did liquidate Palestinian freedom fighters captured during or following bloody resistance operations against Israelis.
But these cases were quite rare and represented the exception rather than the norm. More to the point ostensibly serious investigations would always follow such incidents.
But as far as I know it never happened that dozens of protesters were deliberately massacred or made to suffocate to death as they were being transferred to jails and detention centers as happened in Egypt on Sunday.
Indeed the fact that Israel eventually released from its jails and detention centers Palestinian freedom fighters who had been involved in killing Israelis and given Israel’s unusual sensitivity to shedding “Jewish blood” shows that Israel our enemy has behaved and is behaving in a less barbaric manner toward her enemies in comparison to the way the Egyptian army and police have been treating their own citizens. This is really more than scandalous.
Israel is our enemy. Israel murdered my three uncles in one installment in 1953 effectively exterminating my entire family. Israel condemned my family to live in a cave in abject poverty for 30 years. Yes I don’t forget that.
But in all honesty Israel never reached the level of barbarianism and savagery that we see in Egypt today.
There were violent intifadas (uprisings) against the occupation army in the late 1980s and 2000s but we never saw Israeli helicopter gunship shower peaceful protesters with bullets rather indiscriminately as the Egyptian armed forces are now doing to their own people in broad daylight.
But again Israel is our existential enemy and there ought to be no comparison between the way the Israeli army treats the enemies of the Jewish state on the one hand and the way Arab armies treat their own people on the other. After all Arab armies are supposed to protect not murder their people.
In the past few weeks we all saw how the “heroic” Egyptian armed forces showered with bullets totally peaceful demonstrators protesting the bloody coup by the Sisi gang even without the slightest provocation murdering hundreds and maiming thousands without the slightest compunctions
Indeed in a few weeks of brutal violence against opponents of the bloody coup more Egyptians have been killed and maimed than Palestinians were killed by Israel since the 1967 war. I don’t have the exact figures but the rivers of blood now flowing through Egypt makes any analogy a mere academic task.
Apart from the pornographic killing itself it is noted that the Egyptian army lies as often as it breathes the oxygen of life.
They murder thousands set corpses on fire bomb mosques torch churches in order to blame the crime on the Islamists and let the Baltagiya ( state-paid cutthroats) do the army’s dirty tasks and then claim that the victims committed all of this in order to besmirch the army’s image.
In fact the Egyptian armed forces have been so pornographically mendacious so much so that whatever they say can no longer be taken seriously. I am one of those journalists who have stopped listening or watching the Egyptian media. It is a media whose modus operandi is lying in the most brazen and obscene manner. I am sorry for having reached this conclusion so belatedly.
Criminal Western Stance
A last word. The conspicuously hypocritical American-western stance vis-à-vis the Nazi-like atrocities in Egypt is actually a badge of eternal shame on the conscience of most westerners.
One day when the dark clouds have dissipated and bright skies have replaced the darkness Muslims will remember the criminal role of the West in this tragic episode..
Yes the direct murderers are Sisi and cohorts but the ultimate enabler is America without whose green light and behind-the-scene conspiracies and connivances this massive mayhem wouldn’t have taken place.
